[Where I Watch] Burn Notice – Episode 1×01: Pilot

Yeah. Remember where I said that I wouldn’t do a Where I Watch on here because I couldn’t get enough feedback to support it? Well, yeah, I kinda lied about that. Not really. I’m going to give this a try to see how it turns out. I’ll be starting with the first season of Burn Notice, so kindly provided by Hulu and streamed to my Playstation 3 by the PlayOn Media server software I’m trying out.

If you want to follow along, you can try Hulu as well, and Season 1 is on Netflix as well. We don’t have the complete season 2 on DVD yet, and Hulu’s only got episode 9 of season 2. Yeah, that makes no sense to me either – you’d think you’d have all of season 2 up to now, but I digress.

Before I get started, just to give you an idea on how I do these. I scribble down notes in a notebook (my journal actually – yes I journal, with a fountain pen) in a general stream of consciousness fashion, and then once I’ve finished with the episode or episodes (depending on the show) I attempt to edit those into something coherent (and occasionally succeed) and then post those in the relevant thread or, in this case, a blog post. I tend to do much more editing for reviews. So, on with the post. There are semi-spoilers here.

I have to say, that if the possibilty raises its head that, at Michael’s dentist, that a potential killer (in the sense of someone trying to kill him) lurks within the 2 year old “Time” and “People” magazines in his dentists waiting room – he needs to find a new dentist (or a new insurance provider – or actually get an insurance provider).

I’m liking the voice over narration. It’s somewhat noirish, in the hard-boiled yet snarky Humphrey Bogard sense – I’m thinking specifically of “The Big Sleep” here – there wasn’t any narration there, but there was a hard-boiled yet witty sense to his dialog there, and not only with Lauren Bacall. If you missed that last time you saw The Big Sleep go back and watch it again – I’ll wait. Though, that said, you think they’d hold off on cutting him off with the Burn Notice until he came in from the cold. Even George Smiley wouldn’t be that nasty, in part because if George Smiley was going to put a burn notice on somebody and wasn’t going to kill him, he’d like him where he could easily (have somebody) keep an eye on him – say on The Continent.

Girlfriends like Fiona are why I post on RPG.net, because they will remind me to change my emergency contact to somebody else. However, I’d never work in the CIA in a position where I would get a Burn Notice at that level put out on me, unless they put Burn Notices at that level out on their ITS guys (which, if they’ve read BOFH, they might do).

All that said, Michael certainly is a Magnificent Bastard. That said, he’s going to need some work adjusting to “civilian” life. I’ve got multiple reasons for those quotes there – he’s still having to think like a spy for his line of work, and he’s not a civilian yet – he doesn’t have the rights that your average civilian gets, if you think about it, at least not until he gets that Burn Notice off his back. Though, the restriction to Miami feels slightly Grand Theft Auto or Mercenaries-ish: if you leave the proscribed area on the map, or try to, the heavy end of the hammer (be it a wanted rating or a NATO air strike) comes down on your head.

By the way, Bruce Campell is God. I’m just sayin’

The dealer’s comment about “Iraqui Antiquities” particularly considering how he got in touch with this dealer, makes me suspect that some of those Antiquites may have come out of the fall of Baghdad. It also gives me ideas for a Burn Notice-Lovejoy crossover, but that’s for something else.

I need to get “Guns make you stupid, Duct Tape makes you smart” on a T-Shirt, coffee mug, and bumper sticker. Maybe a mousepad too.

Well, I’d dismissed Vincent (the security guy) as being responsible for the theft as first, he’s the obvious target, and second, because now that I see him on camera longer, he doesn’t look smart enough. However, he it looks like he did pull the “heist” but his boss was the mastermind – bog standard insurance fraud.

Considering the last shot of the episode, there are 2 scenarios that come to mind now for the Burn Notice. Either Michael royally pissed someone off at The Agency (as in, got the guy’s wife pregnant/jilted lover/got his/her daughter pregnant/killed someone important to them/ruined their career/etc.) and this is personal, or if this isn’t personal – just business – then someone at The Agency is touched in the head. Actually, either way, whoever responsible is touched in the head, because head games like this are like something out of The Prisoner, and sane and rational people don’t pull those kind of head games in the “Real World”, or for that matter, Hollywood World. If things weren’t interesting before, they got really interesting now.

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1 Comment

I had a similar experience back in July. Nine episodes into the 12-episode Season One of Burn Notice, the shows disappeared from both Hulu and USA Network’s site. Episodes 11 and 12 showed up for free in iTunes (as a single double-length episode). I had to bittorrent Episode #10.